Current cable and digital satellite television systems are capable of broadcasting two formats of television programming. One format allows the use of high definition televisions having aspect ratios of 16.times.9. A second format provides television programming for televisions having a standard 4.times.3 aspect ratio. However, the use of two video bit streams to transmit the same programming in these alternative formats is both expensive and wasteful of the available bandwidth. Although current satellite television decoders are capable of extracting pan-edit information from a digital bit stream broadcast by a satellite television service provider, as yet no satisfactory method of extracting and then encoding such information within the digital video bit stream has been achieved.